Wow, just wow! Airtime from Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning

I’m sorry, but they raised $40 million for this? Another Chatroulette? And they’re nostalgic for the web of the 1990′s? And they want to restore “surprise and serendipity to the Internet” as if it’s lacking that? This is not innovation, times must be tough in the Valley.

Mr. Parker..said social networks like Facebook could actually discourage a user from connecting with new people. He described the current repertory of social Web experiences as “boring.”

“We’re trying to restore surprise and serendipity to the Internet,” he said in an interview at his Manhattan town house on Sunday. “It was definitely there in the early days, but it has disappeared.”

Mr. Parker and Mr. Fanning hope that by providing a clean, well-lighted place to meet others, Airtime will spark the same kind of serendipitous interactions that brought the two of them together in an online chat room in the late 1990s. That meeting led to an offline friendship and the creation of Napster, which rocked the music business before a barrage of legal challenges shut it down in 2001.

“The downside of all our interactions online is that they are constrained by the social graph,” said Mr. Parker, referring to one’s network of connections on Facebook.

If Airtime sounds reminiscent of Chatroulette, the random video-chatting service that became a kind of global party game in 2010, that is because Chatroulette inspired the service.